Papers › The NiuTrans System for the WMT21 Efficiency Task

The NiuTrans System for the WMT21 Efficiency Task

16 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.08003archive 2025-07-28

Chenglong Wang, Chi Hu, Yongyu Mu, Zhongxiang Yan, Siming Wu, Minyi Hu, Hang Cao, Bei Li, Ye Lin, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

This paper describes the NiuTrans system for the WMT21 translation efficiency task (http://statmt.org/wmt21/efficiency-task.html). Following last year's work, we explore various techniques to improve efficiency while maintaining translation quality. We investigate the combinations of lightweight Transformer architectures and knowledge distillation strategies. Also, we improve the translation efficiency with graph optimization, low precision, dynamic batching, and parallel pre/post-processing. Our system can translate 247,000 words per second on an NVIDIA A100, being 3× faster than last year's system. Our system is the fastest and has the lowest memory consumption on the GPU-throughput track. The code, model, and pipeline will be available at NiuTrans.NMT (https://github.com/NiuTrans/NiuTrans.NMT).

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Knowledge DistillationTranslation

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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